Putting Affirmations for Your Teenager Into Practice

BY ARLENE F. HARDER

"You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going."

— P. J. O'Rourke

The first step in helping your teenager learn about identity, sexuality and separating is the recognition of the skills he will need to have to live on his own. The second step is finding a way to support him as he becomes more clear about who he is, what his sexual identity is, and how he can best fit into the adult world.

The links on this page are designed to help you toward that goal. They complement the information you will find in Strategies for Raising Resourceful, Resilient and Compassionate Children and You Teach Your Children With Everything You Do and Say.

Dealing With Drugs and Alcohol Clearly and Directly

While teenagers have long drunk alcohol at their parties, many parents wring their hands and say there isn’t anything they can do about it. With an attitude of “Kids will be kids,” parents tacitly endorse drinking by not taking a stronger stand. And I’m not talking here about an occasional glass of wine with the parents around the dining room table. I’m talking about serious binge drinking, cigarettes, and pot. Parents have more impact in this scenario than they think.

I don’t make this statement because I have successfully kept my children out of harms way. What I write, I have learned the hard way.

When my teenage son began using pot and alcohol many years ago, we didn’t know what to do and said, like many other parents, that he would grow out of it, and that experimentation was a “natural” part of growing-up. When it began, I couldn't know how much emotional toll the problem would eventually take on our family. Most of all, I didn’t know how much these substances damaged the brain, that vital organ involved, moment-by-moment, in everything we do.

So while I suspected there was some damage to my child’s brain, I didn’t have the ammunition to insist we get help early in dealing with the problem. Now, because I have seen the difference in SPECT scans of normal brains and those of people who have been using pot or alcohol for even one or two years, the evidence is clear. [See How You Can Shape Your Child's Brain and Change the World.] Full use of the brain’s capacity is not compatible with the abuse of alcohol or drugs.

You can tell me, of course, of brilliant people who were able to do a great deal with their lives despite their drinking. But I will respond that they might have done much more had they not drunk so much. Incidentally, I am not opposed to all drinking. I believe adults can learn how to drink responsibly and I occasionally enjoy a glass of wine or beer myself.

I am aware that teenagers have a great deal of pressure in life today. That is not a reason to allow them to experiment without taking steps to communicate with them about it. Eight out of ten teens say, “I can always trust my parents to be there for me when I need them.” Well, this is a time when you must let your teens know that they need you. Teenagers’ growing brains are too young to handle the potential dangers attached to alcohol, smoking and drugs.

While I know that waiting until your child is a teenager before you address the issue of alcohol and build the relationship with your child that can prevent drinking and drug use, it is never too late. [See Preventing Drugs and Alcohol Abuse.]

Straight Talk About Difficult Issues

Talking with Kids About Tough Issues

Raising a child is probably the most gratifying job any of us will ever have -- and one of the toughest. We live in an increasingly complex world that challenges us every day with a wide range of disturbing issues that are difficult for children to understand and for adults to explain.

Talking with Kids about the News

As adults, we depend on "The News" as our primary source for information about the world we live in. Whether it's the local newspaper, nightly TV newscasts, cable news networks, news radio, or Web sites, graphic footage and accounts of the latest happenings in the world are being delivered right into our homes 24 hours a day. This constant barrage can be overwhelming for adults, but it can be especially confusing and frightening for young children.

Talking With Teens About Sex.

Your child doesn't learn about sex from one father-to-son conversation or one mother-to-daughter talk. He or she has absorbed the attitude in your home toward sex from all the seemingly minor interactions you and your child's other parent have expressed. Blowing a kiss. Holding hands. Respect for the opinion of the other person. Snuggling on the sofa while watching TV. Numerous casual comments and deeper discussions about the way in which sex is depicted on TV and in movies. All these, and more, go into the way your child builds a concept of what sex means.

In our highly sexual culture, it is difficult to raise children who haven't heard a lot about sex that we wish they didn't know. But they know it. So now is the time to discuss with them what your values are and to explore what they want their values to be.

The following are websites that promote abstinence only programs:

Abstinence Clearinghouse

Choosing the Best

Silver Ring Thing

Here are websites that are in favor of abstinence-plus, or comprehensive sex education programs:

Advocates for Youth

Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States

Georgia Parents for Responsible Health Education

What would the web be like without sites for teenagers? Here are some sites specifically designed for teenagers to get information and ask questions about sex that they are afraid to ask their parents about.

Ask Beth

Coalition for Positive Sexuality: Sex Ed for Teens

Go Ask Alice!

American Social Health Organization

SEX, etc.

Teenwire

Does Abstinence Work?

What you believe about abstinence before marriage depends on your own experience, your religious views, and the hope that your teen will choose wisely. It isn't always an easy choice.

On May 22, 2005, the CBS Sixty Minutes program aired interviews with Ed Bradley and Denny Pattyn, a Christian youth minister who created the music, light and education Silver Ring Thing abstinence program, a teen high school couple who plan to be abstinent until marriage, and Columbia University’s Peter Bearman, who co-authored the most comprehensive study ever done on adolescent health and sexuality. Here are some excerpts from that program. At the left are websites offering different perspectives on abstinence and sites for teens.

"For about two decades, the top public health agencies in America urged young people to use condoms to reduce the risk of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

"But the U.S. government has dramatically reversed course. Over the past five years, it has spent nearly $1 billion to persuade young people that the only safe form of sex is within marriage—and that condoms are not as effective as people think.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to bring the Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage message to the nation’s classrooms. Millions more are going to religious organizations that urge kids to take a virginity pledge promising to remain abstinent-until-marriage.

"....The federal government is spending $167 million this year to spread that abstinence-only message. And there’s a law that says that for a program like Silver Ring Thing to receive government funding, it must not talk about the health benefits of using condoms—only about how they fail."

Pattyn believes preaching against condom use will protect against the "massive mess sexually with teenagers" that we now have. As a counter to that perspective, the show introduced Bearman, who headed the $45-million project that was funded by 17 separate federal agencies and interviewed more than 20,000 young people about virginity pledge programs. He noted that there was some good news.

"Pledging will help them delay sex for, say, 18 months—a year and a half. It's a big deal in the lives of teenagers. Eighteen months is a phenomenally long time. It’s almost two school years."

"So what's the downside?

"The downside is that, when they have sex, pledgers are one-third less likely to use condoms at first sex. So all of the benefit of the delay in terms of pregnancy-risk and in terms of STD acquisition—poof—it just disappears because they’re so much less likely to use a condom at first sex.

"Why do they not use condoms?"

"They’ve been taught that condoms don’t work; they’re fearful of them. They don’t know how to use them. Their peers don’t use them. They have no experience with them. They don’t know how to get them. . . . For whatever reason they don’t use them, that has long-term consequences."

Not only are kids who take virginity pledges just as likely to have sexually transmitted diseases as kids who don’t, but they are even more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behavior.

"....Adolescents who take virginity pledges—who remain virgins, that is, who don’t have vaginal sex, who technically remain virgins, are much more likely to have oral and anal sex."

"They're not thinking they’re having sex?"

"Well, if they are trying to preserve their virginity, their technical virginity by having oral or anal sex, then obviously they’re defining these behaviors as not sex.

"So they’re probably less likely to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease?"

"They're much less likely to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease. They’ve taken a public pledge to remain a virgin until marriage. The sex that they have is much more likely to be hidden. It’s likely to be hidden from their parents. It’s likely to be hidden from their peers. And if they live in a small community, it’s quite likely to be hidden from their doctor."

See the main list on the left for websites that offer perspectives on both sides of the abstinence question.